Pumpkin Carvers

Fairy Collection #2

These Farm based Fairies look like four-limbed grasshoppers. The average members of the colonies are wingless, but their queen has wings. She uses these to scout out raiding sites, and in the case their colony is discovered, she flies off to scout out a new colony location. Her crown being passed, not hereditarily, but magically. The new queen is chosen and sprouts wings after a funeral feast, including the magically sprouted pumpkin vine the entire colony partakes of.

From the farmer’s perspective, this tiny nuisance uses pumpkins and other gourd as housing and food. They hollow out and use magic on the shells to prolong their lifespan without going soft and rotten. The flesh and seeds are eaten, with the seeds being dried and saved for the months that gourds are out of season. While the fiber is washed, dried, and used to make armor-like clothing.

Farmers assume the pumpkin carvers are purposely smashing their pumpkins when in reality, they occasionally lose one while trying to procure a replacement home or shore up their food stores. Pumpkin carvers are in fact one of the more benign fey but are hunted and treated as vermin just the same. Occasionally an enterprising farmer will catch one, hoping to see if they have any power he can harness for himself. They likewise have little magic, and what they have, would never be used in behalf of a human garden.

K.B. Silver

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